Ghostcrawler's rational for giving Sacred Shield to Prot was because they never took anything else. And this is exactly why the new talent system is so flawed. Ret takes SH, Holy takes EF, and Prot takes SS. If your going to make one talent baseline for one spec, why not give it to the rest of us? I actually think giving Sacred Shield baseline for every Spec would be the right move. That means Ret doesn't need to choose between SH or the new SS, Prot will remain as it is, and the nerf to EF might not have hit Holy too hard if they also had the ability to cast SS.

It just makes so much more sense. This is what paladins need. The devs prove time and time again that they don't know how to do anything for Paladins. I thought the general consensus is that Ret's are amazing at off-heals, and that's what they do better than anyone else. If you take that away from them, then what do we have? We would literally become a 2-minute class through and through. We've got 2 minutes on burst, and 2 minutes on our defensive CD's. In between that, we will have nothing else. No off-heals, and weak damage. I think choice is good, but with these new talent trees, there are some obvious choices that are far better for certain Specs in almost all cases, specifically SH for Ret. Ret will not sacrifice SH because the personal/group benefit is much higher than taking a 2min Sacred Shield for strictly personal survivability.

Ret's personal survivability is something that should be given to them as a baseline passive/talent. It should not be given to us a choice. Obviously no one at Blizz plays a paladin.

Watching the dev's play around with Paladins is hilarious. They always seem to find a new way to never give us what we need.

Yeah, the new talent system has turned into a complete farce, especially for Paladins... virtually every talent tier has a mandatory talent for Ret with no meaningful alternatives at all. Every expansion they sell us some fancy makeover for talents, instead of admitting that all talents have ever needed is hard work and careful thought, not just another re-arrangement.

As Ret, it'll be hard to pass up Selfless healer for the new Sacred Shield. But in terms of usefulness, the new Sacred Shield is better then the old one for Ret. The problem is the 2 minute cool down. Though with the changes to Unbreakable Spirit, this might make a good combination. Especially in PvP when teams tend to just burn down Rets and force them to bubble early. You won't have enough time to build up 1 or 2 Selfless healer stacks. So if they burn you down, then they have to go through Sacred Shield and then Divine Shield. Then 2.5 minutes later rinse repeat.

In a Raid environment it's hard to say. I've given out some impressive Flash of Lights with Selfless healer that's saved many people, including myself. Though Sacred Shield will be good for moments where some fights give out massive damage all at once.

Yes, I finally saw something official about it. So yes: that IS awesome and I'd recommend to take this as prot. For holy/ret: still maybe. SH got a nice buff for holy. But still you have to use judgement.

Originally Posted by voidspark

That's not a buff, you're far better off just casting heals instead of judging.

From a ret perspective, I'm on the same page as everyone else. The ICD needs to be lowered to 60-90 seconds, I think that's what it has been changed to in cata, aswell.

Since SH is good as it is, EF still needs to be looked at if you want to make it an option for ret aswell. I'd suggest baking in the old last word at least for ret, so that it basically autocrits EF below 35% hp when used on yourself.

Speaking of cata talents, I'm wondering if the 20% healing increase during the absorb of sacred shield will still be there.

All I took away from reading the latest information is they have NO FREAKING CLUE what they're doing. Oh we're giving Prot Sacred Shield baseline, but we don't like that so we'll probably take it away. later Then why tempt us by giving it to us at all? It's clear that they really don't know what they're doing and are just tossing anything out to see if it works or if they like it; in other words they repeatedly try to force us to play the game the way THEY would play the game.

I think they need to just realize that people are going to min-max talents, and that's not a bad thing. So what if Holy only takes EF and Prot only ever takes SS? Why is that such a terrible concept to them?

Yeah this is a bit strange. There are lots of tiers like this - just look what's happening to Warlocks at the moment.

They need to put the initial heal of EF back up to 100%, otherwise that talent is a total trap.

They could allow us to have mana regen + holy power for using Judgement, or something, which means that Selfless Healer could actually be worth using. Sacred Shield is crazy bad in the new implementation. Needs to be one of those talents where it's pretty different for each spec (look at the druid talents).

No it doesn't. You lose Selfless Healer to take it and selfless healer is a big reason you bring a ret to arena.

Disagree. Freedom, BoP, and Absolve is what you bring a Ret for. The heals can be nice, but at the end of the day if your buddy is MS'd you won't heal for enough to keep someone up. SH heals are a speed bump, even if the target is not MS'd. Even with 5% crit buff, I only have around 25% crit with Inq up in almost full tyrannical so 1 in 4 heals actually crit?

Like other people are saying, I would be happy if they made SH a 1-1.5 min CD and 50-60% of our life. The Lock absorb shield is like 400k every minute and they have strong self heals also. Either that or make Clemency less necessary. Clemency actually pisses me off quite a bit, and I almost wish they would revert all the hand nerfs they did this xpac and remove it.
Freedom used to be 8-10 seconds 25 second CD in the past.
BoP used to be 3 min CD, now its 5.
etc.

---------- Post added 2013-06-21 at 01:29 PM ----------

Originally Posted by Aerodyne

Yeah this is a bit strange. There are lots of tiers like this - just look what's happening to Warlocks at the moment.

They need to put the initial heal of EF back up to 100%, otherwise that talent is a total trap.

They could allow us to have mana regen + holy power for using Judgement, or something, which means that Selfless Healer could actually be worth using. Sacred Shield is crazy bad in the new implementation. Needs to be one of those talents where it's pretty different for each spec (look at the druid talents).

I disagree that EF needs to go back. It is fine that it allows Paladins (especially Holy) a HoT at expense of burst healing. They just need to buff other talents such as Sacred Shield to make it not a flat out nerf.

---------- Post added 2013-06-21 at 01:31 PM ----------

Originally Posted by Arothand

All I took away from reading the latest information is they have NO FREAKING CLUE what they're doing. Oh we're giving Prot Sacred Shield baseline, but we don't like that so we'll probably take it away. later Then why tempt us by giving it to us at all? It's clear that they really don't know what they're doing and are just tossing anything out to see if it works or if they like it; in other words they repeatedly try to force us to play the game the way THEY would play the game.

I think they need to just realize that people are going to min-max talents, and that's not a bad thing. So what if Holy only takes EF and Prot only ever takes SS? Why is that such a terrible concept to them?

The design goal is that it shouldn't be clear cut. Harder to "min-max" a HoT vs Absorb shield talent. One will be stronger for keeping 1 target up, 1 should be stronger for raid healing. What situation/playstyle does the paladin want?

I think they just need to start dealing with the pally tree like Druid talents are, that the talent does different(but similar) things for each spec, like Sanctified Wrath.

"Regarding Sacred Shield, we tried giving the talent as a baseline ability to Protection, but we’re unhappy with that experiment and are likely to revert the change. We agree that the current (old) version of Sacred Shield is more attractive to Holy than the (new) version. We also would likely have to nerf Protection to compensate for getting Holy Shield in addition to another talent. Overall, we think the current (old) version of Sacred Shield is a better design. Perhaps we can still make Sacred Shield more attractive for Holy and Retribution, and make the other two talents (Selfless Healer, Eternal Flame) more attractive to Protection."

I would love to have some talent diversity as a tank on this talent tier. Selfless Healer is in no way attractive for tanking in its current incarnation.

Eternal Flame is meh for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it costs holy power which could be used on SotR. Secondly, absorbing damage is better than healing it up.

Giving prot Holy Shield and a new talent would be a mistake, since prot really doesn't need buffs. As the blue said, we would be nerfed if the change happened. They just need to find a way to make Selfless Healer or Eternal Flame worth looking at.

We also would likely have to nerf Protection to compensate for getting Holy Shield in addition to another talent.

If Sacred Shield had become baseline for Prot, they could have simply nerfed its scaling to whatever level desired with no need to worry about the impact on its usefulness for Ret and Holy. Result: they'd actually have gained another tuning knob for Prot; tank balancing would be easier as a result.

Given a baseline Sacred Holy Shield, I'd be going Eternal Flame as Prot for that tier. Initial heal vs. Word of Glory is reduced by 27-30% depending on STR and Vengeance, but overall healing done by a single cast every 30s is increased by roughly 200%. An expenditure of 3 HoPo every 30s on a 5-stack of Bastion could be used rotationally for another low-overheal cushion (along the lines of Holy Shield -- but being a HoT rather than an absorb, unable to compete with the live version of SS itself). It could be something else above and beyond our current mindless ability spam to watch and maintain.

EF for Prot would catch up with WoG for overall healing between the 1st and 2nd HoT tick. If a slight initial healing deficit for a few seconds is going to be the difference between life and death, then the originally proposed 5.4 SS would be the talent to use to progress on that fight. Otherwise, EF wins.

So Blizzard is backpedaling on a change in the name of balance and tuning concerns when the initial change they had suggested would ... give them another useful knob for balance and tuning. All while adding some complexity to the button-mashy Prot Paladin ability rotation.

Unless they actually pull off the impossible and make Sacred Shield attractive to Holy, they're giving up a big opportunity here.

Especially for ret Sacred Shield is superb as it is now - it absorbs a good deal of damage in raid & pvp environment, and allows you to quest and do everyday solo content with next to no damage taken, giving us survivability that is currently shit without SS. And it doesn't require you to waste holy power, like Eternal Flame does.

Trading a reliable, cheap and controllable damage absorber for some retarded auto-proc on a 2-min cd? No thanks.

And who do we have tho thank for this retardness? The worthless idiots who kept whining about Sacred Shield, not knowing how to use it properly. Same kind of people who whine about Inquisition.

Especially for ret Sacred Shield is superb as it is now - it absorbs a good deal of damage in raid & pvp environment, and allows you to quest and do everyday solo content with next to no damage taken, giving us survivability that is currently shit without SS. And it doesn't require you to waste holy power, like Eternal Flame does.

Trading a reliable, cheap and controllable damage absorber for some retarded auto-proc on a 2-min cd? No thanks.

And who do we have tho thank for this retardness? The worthless idiots who kept whining about Sacred Shield, not knowing how to use it properly. Same kind of people who whine about Inquisition.

That is False. Sacred Shield is not good for Ret in PvP. It absorbs next to nothing when you add battle fatigue. If you are a Ret Paladin doing PvP and you are not taking Selfless Healer you are playing wrong.

What they need to do is make the Cata version of Sacred Shield baseline for Ret and improve the current version of Sacred Shield so it isn't so useless for Ret to take.

As I understand it you still need to keep the 30sec buff up on you in order to make the 30% absorb activate when/if you drop under 30%, so for pvp it can (and will) be purged off you unless it gets some kind of protection. The current one at least didn't run the risk of being purged off because it didn't absorb enough on short time.

As I understand it you still need to keep the 30sec buff up on you in order to make the 30% absorb activate when/if you drop under 30%, so for pvp it can (and will) be purged off you unless it gets some kind of protection. The current one at least didn't run the risk of being purged off because it didn't absorb enough on short time.

No. The way it is on the Ptr right now Sacred Shield procs when you hit 30% health. You don't need to do anything to make it happen.